Abstract
The effect of Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) is becoming increasingly serious in cities. Research on the adaptive planning policies for microthermal environments at the residential block level of cities is thus becoming of greater significance. Based on the cooling effect of planning control elements in residential block areas, the element effects characteristics of water bodies and vegetation distribution on the thermal environment of residential blocks were analyzed by using ENVI-met software. The simulation data analysis showed that the combination of water bodies and vegetation had a synergistic cooling effect. Based on these results, simulations of five effective adaptive measures were carried out step by step in planning scenarios, that is, improving the water bodies with vegetation corridors, the application of high-albedo material on streets, and increasing the number of green patches, east-west green corridors, and north-south green corridors. The results were as follows. First, although each of the five optimization strategies have a certain degree of cooling effect on the entire block, the superposition of each factor had a synergistic effect. Second, different spatial optimization strategies had different cooling ranges for each subzone. The optimization of the north-south green corridor, green patches, and water features corridors were particularly significant for microclimate cooling. The east-west green corridor has a certain influence on a certain range of downwind zones and had an auxiliary cooling effect. The high-albedo material also had a weak overall decrease function for the thermal environment. Finally, the downwind area of the urban creek network had a great impact on cooling intensity, with distance attenuation characteristics; it was also proposed that the comprehensive cooling effect of the green space network with optimized layout was greater than that of any single green space element. The optimization scenario planning research provided a method for improving the scientific distribution of adaptation measures in urban residential blocks.
Highlights
The Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report stated that global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century (2081–2100), compared with the years from 1850 to 1900, was projected to likely exceed 1.5 ◦C [1]
The 35 ◦C standard of the National Meteorological Administration has been adopted by Shanghai [84,85]
The highest temperature in a day occurs at approximately 2 p.m., so the aim for a standard cooling effect is the 35 ◦C threshold at the daily time of 2 p.m
Summary
The Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report stated that global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century (2081–2100), compared with the years from 1850 to 1900, was projected to likely exceed 1.5 ◦C [1]. The analysis of the cause of urban heat islands shows that land use change is an important factor [5]. Research on the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect under the influence of urbanization had has been paid more and more attention in recent years [10]. Rapid urbanization has brought economic development to China, but has greatly changed the urban thermal environment to aggravate the urban heat island effect [13]. Based on the data of 41 meteorological stations in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration, it was found that the average warming rates of the air temperature of huge cities, megalopolises, large cities, medium-sized cities, and small cities were 0.483, 0.314 ± 0.030, 0.282 ± 0.042, 0.225 ± 0.044, and 0.179 ± 0.046 ◦C/decade during the period of 1957–2013, respectively. With the passage of time, the difference of the four seasons of the heat island effect tends to be homogenized in Shanghai [15]
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